So I have a cool new computer. It's another laptop, it's built specially for gaming and it means I can actually play my video games instead of them lagging to crap. To be specific, it's a HP Pavilion Gaming laptop with an Intel i5 processor and an NVidia GeForce GTX 950M graphics card. In broad terms, this is a huge step up: my old laptop (and the one I'm writing this on, because it still has functionality and I'm not above keeping this old thing so my new laptop can be a dedicated gaming PC) had an i7 processor, but the graphics card was a much older GeForce GT 640M which meant I had trouble playing games like Bulletstorm or even Doom. The original Doom. That started lagging on my laptop, it got that bad. But that's why I upgraded.
Only now, I have a new problem.
That problem is the latest Doom game. I'd heard so much good stuff about it and I was looking forward to playing it, so I spent several hours downloading it confident in the knowledge that I at least had the minimum requirements for this awesome new game. The Doom franchise has become one of my fast favourites and I've enjoyed playing the retro games as much as 2005's Doom 3 (I even like the godawful movie. Eh, it's just hammy enough).
So I was devastated when I tried to play it... and it lagged to crap. I want to point out, the HP Pavilion is literally made for gaming, and every other game has held up just fine including Fallout 4, which I can play on medium settings. Even on low graphics settings Doom won't run at an even 30fps, and from the intro cinematic I can see why.
Even on low settings, Doom is ridiculously detailed. You can see the veins popping on Doomguy's hands as he struggles against the chains, the holograms are made up of thousands of individual dots and every little thing is absorbed in detail which just throws the game into massive slowdown on my literally-made-last-year built-for-gaming laptop. The Doom series has always prided itself on being right on the cusp of computer advancement - the original game saved on processing power by rendering only what the player was seeing at that moment and it was one of the first games to even think of doing that - but I think it gets to ridiculous levels when you need a custom-built PC tower to play the game.
And this brings me onto my main point. If low quality is not low enough to play the game on last year's budget model (and it really is budget: £700 got me this laptop, less than I paid for my nice Acer that I am typing this on) then perhaps Bethesda needs to look at how they're building their games and what sort of market they're aiming for. If the People cannot play your game without shelling out another £1,000 for a dedicated gaming PC that can be upgraded every year, then who are you making your game for? Not the people who would be looking at it in store, that's for sure. And not for me.
This is my problem with PC gaming: there's this in-built elitism where only the ones who can afford to build their own PC to custom specs and upgrade it yearly can play the games, and they look down on anyone who cannot DIY their computer or just don't see the point. We get a divide between "Gamers" and "Filthy Casuals" and the creators who decide that their games must look their best even on the lowest settings enable that divide.
I am aware I could just buy it on console (and I intend to, as soon as I get my Xbox back) but the point here is not that Doom won't run on my laptop (although that is an important point); the point here is that my laptop is brand new and built for this, other games released this year run just fine on it so why doesn't Doom? Literally nothing more is happening in Doom than in Fallout 4 - in fact, I would argue less is happening as Doom opens in narrow, linear corridors - and yet one runs fine while the other does not. I think there is a fine line between keeping detail in your game so that people can see how good it looks, and straight up locking people out because you're too afraid of hurting the looks to lower the textures any more.
I'm especially appalled that it's Doom that's doing this. Never has the series looked better than when it was in pixel and sprite form, and although I still laugh at the corpses which apparently turn to face you wherever you go (ah, the joy of 2D sprites!) it had a certain style and it runs well. And I know we're talking about a game made in the '80s or '90s compared to one released literally two weeks ago, but this is a franchise that has been modelled on the retro look and it has brought it into the 21st century in a good way with the new look, but at the expense of playability.
This is my problem. My budget for gaming should not lock me out of games. Yeah, if I couldn't afford the £40 price tag I would be fine with not playing Doom. But it's because I couldn't afford a computer costing more than £700 that I can't play the game, and that's just ridiculous. It's not a case of not having the hardware, it's a case of the game being badly planned or designed and in the end, being released without the option to go to a graphics setting that would support a store-bought computer.
And in the end, I'd trade 2016's particle effects for 1993's pixels any day, if it meant I could actually play the damn thing.
Adieu!
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